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Arthur Bremer
|birth place = Milwaukee, Wisconsin |job = Busboy School janitor |pathology = Attempted Assassin Stalker |mo = Shooting |type = Type III assassin |victims = 5 attempted |time = May 15, 1972 |charges = Assault on a federal officer Civil rights violation Attempted murder Assault and battery Assault with intent to murder Assault with intent to maim Two gun violations |sentence = 63 years of imprisonment |capture = May 15, 1972 |status = Released}} Arthur Herman Bremer is an American attempted assassin responsible for a shooting attack on U.S. Democratic presidential candidate and Alabama governor George Wallace, on May 15, 1972. While he originally intended to kill then-U.S. President Richard Nixon, he could not find an opportunity to do so. He was tried, convicted of the attempt, and has now been released. Background Bremer was born in 1950 and raised in the south side area of Milwaukee. The fourth of five children of working-class William and Sylvia Bremer, he grew up in a dysfunctional and abusive household, marked by a hostile, domineering, and manipulative mother who had a gambling habit, and a mostly passive, distant father who was prone to alcoholism as a means to relieve his frustrations and insulate himself from this environment. It comes as no surprise that Arthur's older siblings all fled to the streets as soon as they could, leaving him at the mercy of Sylvia, who began subjecting him to uncommunicative and rigid forms of attention, in order to prove herself she was still capable of being a good mother. Developing suicidal thoughts from the age of 9, Arthur found support in a neighborhood church he frequented, to the point that he even considered priesthood, if not for his family's decision to relocate. At South Division High School, Arthur had few friends, no girlfriends, and, despite his impressive intelligence, was basically an underachiever. He briefly played in a football team, though his career was suddenly interrupted when his mother prevented him from keeping on. Graduating in 1969, he later found work as a busboy at Milwaukee Athletic Club, where he ended up demoted for displaying weird mannerisms which annoyed customers. He also found employment as a part-time janitor at Story Elementary School. In late 1970, he began taking psychology, art, writing, and photography courses at Milwaukee Technical College, eventually dropping out after only one year of unremarkable achievements. During this period, he met fellow outcast Thomas Neuman, and the two kinda became friends. Unfortunately, Neuman took his own life while playing a sort of Russian roulette game, and this made a strong impression on Arthur. In October of '71, as fights with his parents were becoming more and more violent, the latter decided to move into his own place, a one-bedroom unit near Marquette University. Shortly afterwards, he bought a .38 caliber Charter Arms Undercover revolver from Casanova Gun Shop, and, on November 18, had his very first run-in with the law: he was arrested and charged for parking in a no-parking zone and for carrying a concealed weapon, getting away with a fine for disorderly conduct. As he had to turn in his revolver, he bought another identical one, the same he would later use in his attack against Wallace. Weeks before his first arrest, Arthur met and fell in love with fifteen-year old Joan Pemrich, a student who worked at the Story Elementary School as a hall monitor. While she was mainly attracted by Arthur's adulthood and independence, the latter completely overestimated the nature of their relationship, not to mention his clumsy and awkward attitude, which embarrassed Joan more than once in front of her family and friends. In the end, and despite Arthur's persistence, she refused to see him again. It was the beginning of the end for him. On January 31 and February 16, 1972, he quit both his job at Story and at the Athletic Club respectively. He bought another gun, a 9mm Browning, and, on March 1, began keeping a journal, whose opening words were: "It is my personal plan to assassinate by pistol either Richard Nixon or George Wallace. I intend to shoot one or the other while he attends a campaign rally for the Wisconsin Primary." Assassination Attempts Before committing himself to the assassination of a prominent political personality, Bremer had meditated for a while on how to put and end to his life in the most spectacular and outrageous way possible. He had previously thought about shooting himself on a busy midtown bridge, while being tied to the railings with a rope attached to his neck (the plan is remarkably similar to the one Mark David Chapman came up with before deciding to assassinate John Lennon). He had also thought about hijacking an armored car, drive to a busy intersection, and kill as many people as possible from inside the vehicle, with a rifle. However, he wanted to be sure that his name be remembered in history, so he resolved targeting a politician, like John Wilkes Booth, Lee Harvey Oswald, and Sirhan Sirhan did before him (he would later borrow two biographies of the latter from a public library). Arthur had even selected a catchphrase to exclaim during the shooting, although he later forgot to do it: "A penny for your thoughts." Bremer spent the month of March and the early days of April attending rallies for Wallace, in and around Milwaukee. In addition, before definitively embarking himself on his mission, he took a short trip to New York City, intending to have sex, for the first and last time in his life, with a hooker. However, due to a misunderstanding on his part, he couldn't obtain what he wanted, and returned to Milwaukee, deprived of his dignity after this further failure. Richard Nixon Bremer decided his best opportunity to kill Nixon (who was his favorite and prime target) was during the latter's visit to the Canadian Parliament, in Ottawa. Preparing himself for the trip, he decided to hide his guns inside a space near the wheel well of his car trunk, but he ended up thrusting his Browning so deeply he couldn't recover it. On April 13, he stationed himself along the route to the Government House, where the presidential motorcade was scheduled to pass, but was interrupted in his plans by a Canadian mounted officer who engaged a conversation with him. Next day, April 14, Bremer was determined more than ever to carry out on his proposal, and he had even suited himself for the occasion. Wearing a black business suit and a tie, he presented himself outside the Parliament building, where Nixon was going to have a speech. As fate would have it, security was tighter than he had imagined, because of the great deal of anti-Vietnam protesters at the event. Discouraged, Bremer realized it was impossible for him to get to Nixon, so he re-focused himself on the more easily accessible Wallace. George Wallace On May 8, Bremer left his Milwaukee apartment for good, converting his car into a hotel room on wheels. He decided to feign being a Wallace campaign supporter to study his target and better fit in the crowd. He visited the campaign headquarters in Silver Spring, Maryland, approaching a female coordinator named Janet Petrone and offering himself as a volunteer. Arthur later attended Wallace rallies in the Michigan locales of Lansing, Cadillac, Frederick, and Kalamazoo, where he was briefly interrogated by a policeman. He finally got his long-awaited opportunity in Laurel, Maryland, on May 15. While Wallace walked among the crowd of his supporters, shaking hands after his speech, Bremer, dressed in patriotic red, white, and blue, and wearing a campaign button, aimed at the governor's mid-section and emptied his revolver before he could be subdued. Three other people, other than Wallace, who was hit four times, were injured in the shooting: a campaign supporter, Wallace's personal bodyguard, and a Secret Service agent. Trial, Imprisonment, and Aftermath After his arrest, Bremer was taken to Prince George's County Hospital for treatment of a head wound he had sustained when the shots went off. Upon discovering that Wallace had survived the gunfire (although he was left paralyzed from the waist down, as one bullet had lodged in his spinal cord), Arthur refused to answer anyone's questions, and asked for an American Civil Liberties Union lawyer, which was not provided to him since the Baltimore chapter found no reason to believe his constitutional rights had been violated (though the ACLU would later lament the excessive amount of sensationalization of the case). Shortly after midnight on May 16, as the FBI had taken over the investigation, he was charged with two federal offenses (which were eventually dropped after his state trial). The latter was held in Upper Marlboro, Maryland, and lasted only five days, beginning on June 31. Despite allegations from the defense that he suffered from schizophrenia and was thus insane, the jury found Bremer guilty on all counts on August 4. He was sentenced to sixty-three years of imprisonment, which were later reduced to fifty-three. His final statement was: "Well, Mr. Marshall prosecutor mentioned that he would like society to be protected from someone like me. Looking back on my life I would have liked it if society had protected me from myself. That's all I have to say at this time." Bremer served his sentence at the Maryland Correctional Institution, in Hagerstown. He was placed in solitary confinement three times in the months following his arrival, but later did well, and was even regarded as a hero by the African-American population for shooting Wallace, a known segregationist. Released in 2007, having served thirty-five years of his original sentence, his time on probation will end in 2025. A hundred pages of Bremer's diary were published in 1973 as An Assassin's Diary, covering the period from April 4, 1972, to the day before he shot Wallace and his subsequent arrest. Paul Schrader would later draw inspiration from it for the screenwriting of Martin Scorsese's 1976 [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taxi_Driver Taxi Driver], which features an unremarkable Bremer-like protagonist, portrayed by Robert De Niro, who eventually decides to kill a presidential candidate. The film would later inspire another real-life assassination attempt, perpetrated by John Hinckley, Jr. against Ronald Reagan, in March 1981. Wallace, who continued his political career, forgave Bremer in August 1995, writing to him and expressing the hope that the two could get to know each other better. Bremer did not reply. Wallace died on September 13, 1998. Modus Operandi By attending rallies, dinners, and other events, Bremer stalked both of his pre-selected targets for an amount of time before actually taking action. He employed a .38 caliber snub-nosed Charter Arms Undercover revolver to shot Wallace, accidentally injuring three other people due to stray bullets. Profile Bremer was diagnosed by a court-appointed psychiatrist as suffering from schizoid personality disorder, with some paranoid and psychopathic features. He certainly fit the mold of an assassin personality: white male inadequate loner in his twenties, who comes from a troubled childhood, has self-esteem problems, sees himself as a victim of society's wrongdoings, and is prone to gun fetishism and to express himself through writing. Specifically, he can be classified as a type III assassin: the latters are asocial, nihilistic individuals who resolve targeting public figures as a means to outrage a society they hate, as well as to end their miserable lives in a spectacular "blaze of glory". Known Victims *1972: **April, 13-14: Ottawa, Canada: Richard Nixon **May, 15: Laurel, Maryland: Four injured in the Wallace assassination attempt: ***George Wallace ***E. C. Dothard ***Dora Thompson ***Nick Zavros On Criminal Minds *Season Seven **"A Thin Line" - While Bremer has yet to be directly mentioned or referenced on the show, he appears to have been an inspiration for the episode's unsub, Trevor Mills - Both were attempted assassins who targeted political personalities, although eventually failing in their respective attempts (though Mills succeeded in killing other victims while Bremer failed to kill any). Both also employed firearms in their crimes. Sources *Wikipedia's article on Bremer *James W. Clarke, American Assassins: The Darker Side of Politics. Princeton University Press. 1982. ISBN: 978-0-608-09575-2 *Tim Huddleston. The Real Life Taxi Driver: A Biography of Arthur Herman Bremer (The Real Inspiration of Travis Bickle). CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform. 2013. ISBN: 978-1-484-91439-7 Category:Real People Category:Real Life Narcissists Category:Real Life Psychopaths Category:Real World Criminals Category:Real Life Assassins Category:Real Life Stalkers Category:Incarcerated Real World Criminals Category:Unreferenced Criminals